Service management, such as IT service management and business service management, has attracted attention in recent years. The Information Technology Infrastructure Library (“ITIL”) gives a detailed description of the best practices for achieving IT service management. The primary functions of the ITIL are service support and service delivery, including configuration management.
Configuration management is a process of recognizing configuration items (“CIs”) to be managed by IT service management, and maintaining, updating, checking, and auditing information concerning the configuration items. Configuration items may include system resources, such as hardware and software, facilities necessary for providing IT services, documents such as specifications on IT service management, operation manuals and schematic diagrams, maintenance information services, processes and human resources.
For the ITIL framework, centralized management of the configuration items using a configuration management database (“CMDB”) is recommended. The CMDB is a database that stores at least one predetermined attribute of each configuration item and its relations with other configuration items. Key success factors for implementing a CMDB are discovery, or the ability to automatically discover information concerning the CIs, and tracking, or the ability to automatically update such information. It is important that a CMDB accurately reflect CI information, as service processing based on ITIL includes multiple tasks that are organized into operations that refer to CI information in the CMDB.